Minding Their Manor New Owners Plan To Restore One Of Allentown's Proud Old Mansions To Its Former Splendor.

Steps from the rear entrance of Allentown's Hotel Traylor, across the street from the Hampshire House Apartments and a half-block from the Episcopal House high-rise for the elderly is one of the finest homes in the city.

It has been boarded up for 14 months.

Owned for a half-century by one of Allentown's most prominent families, long the setting for some of the city's richest social gatherings, the 18-room mansion at 25 S. 15th St. has been empty since the summer of 1997.

During the years the house sat empty, every brass lock on the home's exterior doors was stolen. So were the copper downspouts and brass window fixtures.

A group of vandals who broke in last winter carved initials into the dining room's mahogany paneling, sprayed graffiti on kitchen countertops and splashed gloppy green paint across the inlaid hardwood floors.

Caught in a complicated estate settlement and buffeted by declining values, the property hung in the balance for several years, and to many of the nearly 18,000 motorists who drive past the home every day, it must have seemed like the proud old mansion was headed for destruction.

Then a miracle happened: Someone bought it.

Siobhan Loizeaux-Bennett, her husband, Martin Ulloa Estrada, and Loizeaux-Bennett's daughters Emma and Rachel gave up their home at 2334 Livingston St. in Allentown's West End and took up residence at 25 S. 15th St. over the weekend.

"We're going to take it back to its original splendor," said Loizeaux-Bennett. "We have been interested in the house for years, and it was very much a goal of ours to live there."

Combining Georgian, Jacobean and Arts and Crafts architectural styles, the house was built by cement manufacturer William G. Bonneville around 1910 and has had five owners. The best known was the man who owned it the longest: Capt. Nolan P. Benner, who for more than 32 years was executive director of the Trexler Foundation.

Benner purchased the home in 1935, two years after Gen. Harry Clay Trexler's death, and made it his residence until his own passing on Sept. 4, 1980. Benner's widow, Carolyn, who is also deceased, sold the house the next year.

But for three decades under Benner's ownership, 25 S. 15th St., which everyone came to call the Benner Mansion, was the active center of a family of accomplishment and a gathering place for the city's business and political elite.

Nearly every day for 32 years, Benner walked the three blocks between his front door and the Trexler Estate's offices at 1227 Hamilton St. He almost always returned home for lunch, a tradition he followed until illness left him housebound at age 82.

Benner and his first wife, Nettie, who died in 1965, raised two children in the house: Nolan P. Jr., who died in December, and Bettie, wife of the late Charles L. Garrettson, who resides in the city's West End.

"If these walls could talk," Bettie Garrettson said during a visit to the house a few days after Loizeaux-Bennett and Estrada took possession a few weeks ago.

Benner became Trexler's chief aide -- and lifelong confidant -- in 1916 after he had worked for the general when they served together in the Pennsylvania National Guard at Mount Gretna, Lebanon County, during World War I.

After Trexler was killed in a car crash in 1933, and following the death of Trexler's wife a year later, Benner acquired a trove of Trexler's furnishings and personal effects, many of which remain in the possession of the family today.

The house was furnished grandly, Bettie Garrettson recalls. The foyer was as large as the living rooms in other people's homes, and Nettie Benner furnished the entrance hall with a small table surrounded by an arrangement of chairs.

People familiar with the Benner household could judge the status of visitors by whether they were offered a seat on one of the high-backed upholstered chairs in the foyer or whether they were drawn deeper into the comforts of the first floor's arrangement of rooms.

Insurance salesmen and other solicitors never got farther than the foyer, and Garrettson recalls that the circle of chairs came to be called the insurance man's chairs.

Bettie Benner and Charles Garrettson married in 1941, just before the United States entered World War II. Charles Garrettson joined the Naval Reserve shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and his wife continued to reside in her parents' home until after he returned from active duty in 1945.

The living room, with its Old English-style fireplace and its plaster relief ceiling, runs the entire depth of the house. The room is so large that the Benners' grand piano in the northwest corner of the room took up just a fraction of the space.

On the opposite side of the first floor is the mahogany-paneled dining room. A table large enough to comfortably seat more than a dozen people for a formal dinner occupied the center of the room.